Frequency of school shootings in U.S. has risen sharply since Newtown

A fatal shooting in Oregon on Tuesday was the 31st firearms attack at a U.S. school since the start of the year, marking a sharp acceleration in the rash of violence that has occurred on campuses across the nation.

The incidents range from the 20 people shot near the University of California, Santa Barbara less than three weeks ago to gunfire that resulted in no injuries at all.

The frequency of attacks has picked up since the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., where 20 first-graders and six adults were fatally shot.

In the 18 months since that tragedy, 41 deaths have occurred in 62 documented incidents at U.S. schools. In the 18 months before that attack, there were 17 deaths in 17 incidents. Everytown.org, a group that promotes gun safety, lists 72 incidents since Sandy Hook.

The increase comes at a time when all types of violent gun deaths have been essentially flat since about 2000, following a sharp drop since the 1980s, when such deaths peaked in the United States.

On April 20, 1999, seniors Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., a suburb of Denver. They killed 12 students and one teacher, and injured more than 20, before committing suicide.

In the year before Columbine, seven people were killed and 25 injured in six school shootings in Edinboro, Pa.; Fayetteville, Tenn.; Springfield, Ore.; Richmond, Va.; Detroit; and Notus, Idaho.

In the year after Columbine, two were killed and 12 were injured in four school shootings in Conyers, Ga.; Deming, N.M.; Fort Gibson, Okla., and Flint, Mich.

Underlying the high-profile shootings are thousands of incidents involving American youths that never make national headlines, or even get noticed locally. Each year, for example, about 2,000 teens and young children commit suicide with guns at home, said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

“School shootings are part of a much bigger problem,” he said. “There are 86 people who die from bullets on an average day.”

On Tuesday, Jared Michael Padgett, a freshman at Reynolds High School in Troutdale, Ore., killed a fellow student, and |then apparently shot himself in |a bathroom. During the evacuation, authorities found another ­student with a gun not related to the shooting.

Padgett also wounded a teacher who managed to make his way to an office and alert officials, Police Chief Scott Anderson said, adding that the action by teacher Todd Rispler and responding officers likely saved numerous lives on the campus.

The shooter later encountered officers in a hallway. After a brief exchange of gunfire, he fled into a restroom and was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.

Anderson said no link had been found between the shooter and Emilio Hoffman, the 14-year-old student who was killed. No motive was disclosed.

“The shooter obtained the weapons from his family home,” Anderson said. “The weapons had been secured, but he defeated the security measures.”

Padgett fired an AR-15-type rifle and carried a semiautomatic hand­gun, large knife and nine loaded ammunition magazines capable of holding several hundred rounds, Anderson said. The attacker was wearing a camouflage helmet and ammo vest.

The shooting occurred in a gym detached from the main school building.

Garen Wintemute, director of the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program, hesitates to brand such serial events as copycat crimes, but he said shootings tend to feed off themselves.

“The more we are all aware of them, the easier it is for one of us to do the next one,” he said.

Still, Wintemute said that guns remain widely available to individuals who are clearly at risk of committing such violence and that authorities have few tools to intervene.

A bill in the California Legislature would allow families and others to seek a warrant on such individuals, allowing police to search for guns and confiscate them.

But another bill, barring gun ownership for individuals with a history of alcohol abuse and drunken driving arrests, was recently vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown, Wintemute noted.

Gross said the political power of the gun lobby has barred such reasonable approaches to limiting gun possession by individuals who are likely to commit mass murder.

“It is too easy for dangerous people to get their hands on guns,” he said.

Though Gross said there is a growing public outcry against the school shootings, he also said that “we need to turn up the heat.”

Wintemute pointed to the successful campaign to improve highway safety as proof that the death rates can be reduced. In the 1950s, motor vehicle death rates were twice as high as firearm death rates, but improvements in auto safety have resulted in parity today.